Anyone else cry over their bills?

[insanegasbill]

Got our monthly energy bill this morning.

£525. For one month.

I honestly cried. I can't remember the last time I cried over a bill. How is this even possible?!

Last month it was £390 ish which was bad enough so we budgeted around £400 for this month and our usage seemed to be very similar.

We are both employed with good jobs and we are sinking with these ridiculous outgoings.

In January our rent will be £900 as it's going up.

So we are looking at £1400 ish just for rent, gas and electricity come January.

Heating is on a timer and we really do try to limit it, we've been using electric plug in heaters as much as possible instead.

AIBU that this just isn't sustainable? I just needed somewhere to get that out and scream into the void...... What's the actual point of working as hard as we do to be struggling like this? 😢

Ours is going to be £500 a month from Jan. Every single bloody month! (Direct debit)

Spend some time today playing with your smart meter display and working out how to use it. Google / ring them but you need to use the tools you have!

Find the setting that lets you see the 'use right now' in cash terms.

Then you can see instantly what ramps up the power costs.

The gas readings aren't instant but you can switch back to see 'used so far today' to see how much that blast cost vs an experiment day where you try it on low for a few hours.

Don't be passive about this and don't guess - look at what you're actually using then adjust your behaviour based on that.

I have a similar thread going regards the electric bill. Mine is going to be about £700 this month based on the units I have used and the price per unit. I am using approx 50 units a day at 34p a unit and the daily standing charge.

However, I do not have a smart meter, I just took a daily meter reading for two days to see how much it went up.

You really need to start understanding the readings on your meter. Take a reading at a particular time today, write it down and then do the same tomorrow. This will tell you how many units you use in a 24 hour period. Then you need to start working out what is making this so high (probably the electric heaters). If you look at my thread most houses are using between say 6-20 units a day.

Mine is excessively high due to an electric aga (we think). Also, it sounds like you are on estimated readings, you need to provide the electric supplier with a meter reading and pay for what you use.

Electricity costs about 3.5 times as much as gas at the moment. If you tried to save energy by only heating one room with an electric heater, you would have to have a greater than two-thirds reduction in total heat produced before your costs started to be less.

Presumably you would only do this if the room in question had no radiators, as otherwise you could heat only that room more cheaply by using gas and closing the radiator valves in all other rooms.

Many electric heaters do gobble up electricity, so it is highly likely that using those has contributed a lot to this. Put them away and only bring them out for emergencies.

I'm personally finding that running the central heating on constant in these very cold temperatures is a little cheaper per day than just having it on the timer for morning and evening. This also much reduces the possibility of frozen pipes.

Our heating has now reached temperature and as opposed to the boiler firing up for hours on end twice a day it is now only kicking in for the odd 20 minutes to half an hour now and then. I'm leaving it that way for the next few days and if the weather (as forecast) does warm up next week it will be set back to the timer then. I can see on the smart meter that it certainly isn't costing any more. If anything it seems slightly cheaper.

Surely central heating was invented because using one large heater (gas boiler in many cases) is generally a much more efficient way to heat a house than using an array of heaters in different rooms.

I think there's been some media coverage about certain electric heaters been cheap to run but it's not the case for all of them.

The only way an electric heater can be cheaper than another electric heater is if it put out less heat.

To put it another way, one electric heater can be smaller/have less power/produce less heat than another, but it's not possible to use less energy than another to produce the same amount of heat.

I'm talking about self-contained heaters, an exception to this would be a heat pump which pumps in heat from outside your house. But I'm fairly sure those are not within the scope of this conversation.

Apart from being smaller, another way an electric heater can be cheaper than another is if it has a thermostat and/or timer that makes it switch off when the competitor wouldn't. But this still falls into the category of being cheaper only because it is putting out less heat.

@Getoff yes I agree I never bought one but there was something about a halogen heater only a few weeks ago that 'everyone must buy' it was mentioned on Martin Lewis too. I can see why some people would see things like that and assume any plug in heater is a good way of saving money.

Electric heaters cost a fortune to run......even oil heaters. I was shocked at how much the cost to use. 😬
There will be loads of ways you can bring that bill down, keeping yourself warm using hot water bottles, electtic throws etc instead of heating the entire house is where I'd be starting........I've just ordered dp this hot water bottle belt, he's going t o look so cute 🤣🤣🤣

I'm personally finding that running the central heating on constant in these very cold temperatures is a little cheaper per day than just having it on the timer for morning and evening. This also much reduces the possibility of frozen pipes.

Assuming the thermostat is always set to the same level, having the heating on for more hours will always cost more.

I wonder if you have the thermostat higher in the morning and evening-only approach, or if your more-of-the-time -approach excludes some of those morning or evening hours.

Logically, it's obvious that if the only difference between the two approaches is that the heating is on for some extra hours in one case, that option must cost more.

Generally the best strategy is to have the heating on only for the hours you need it, at the lowest temperature you can stand.

An exception to this is if your house has damp penetrating through walls to the inside, the water in the bricks can wick heat from inside to out at a faster rate. In that case, keeping your heating on all the time to keep the bricks dry can reduce the rate at which heat leaks out, so keeping the heating on more can actually result in lower bills.

Electric heaters are touted and assumed to be cheaper by some as they are "100% efficient" vs your gas boiler which may be "85% efficient"

But whether you use a halogen, oil-filled or panel heater, all electric heating (apart from heat pumps) costs up to 4 x more than gas per unit of energy.

Isolating radiators, using trvs properly on a gas CH system is cheaper to run.

We’re in the same boat to be honest. We were quite good in November - it was quite mild so although we were chilly, electric blankets and a coat when working from home did the trick and our bill for November came in at 280 pounds. With this cold spell though our smart meter is telling us we’re on about 20 pounds a day. I just can’t work from home freezing plus the children have been off with various viruses and I didn’t want them freezing. Our combined wages aren’t bad but it’s a struggle and I don’t know how others on low wages or benefits are coping.

Electric is much more expensive than gas, so I wouldn’t dare turn those electric heaters on! They are total energy guzzlers!

Are you in the UK? Its only hit minus since last Friday. Before then we were between 5 and 10 degrees

If the readings on your bill and the smart meter don't seem to tally, check whether the readings from the company are estimated. Both our elec and gas are on smart meters but the elec one is not communicating properly so the readings are all estimated so we submit our own for that.

Agree the elec heaters are likely to be costing a lot.

I think your bill sounds about right OP. It is a lot of money but from reading on here various threads people have said they are spending between £10/£13 per day in gas alone!!

I was thinking of getting one of those OIL heaters?? I think they take longer to heat a room but much cheaper?!

I think they take longer to heat a room but much cheaper

No, electric heating is not cheaper than gas central heating. OP has ran up this amount because they mistakenly thought plugging in electric heaters is cheaper. It isn't. It's up to 4 x more expensive.

Why don't people know this basic fact?!

@MyPurpleHeart no I'm up north in the U.K. it's been in the minus for weeks up here.

If you have gas central heating use that - electric heaters costs fortune.

It is hard to know if you bill is reasonable seeing as we don't know how big your property is, how many people live there and what you use.

There are two of us in a two bed flat and we are currently spending about £4.50 - £5 a day. Before the very cold weather it was more like £2.60 - £3 a day. We are paying £109 a month on DD and that should more than cover our usage this winter as we went in to winter in credit and have the £66 a month rebate.

Under the energy price guarantee the yearly bill for the AVERAGE household should be around £2,500, so you are using significantly more than the average household at the moment - can you investigate why this is?

Also I assume £525 is your cost for actual usage for this month, rather than your monthly DD - you might find it easier to have a smoothing payment (eg pay the same each month) so the lower energy usage in summer allows you to build up credit to cover the more expensive winter months.

It does surprise me how many people are shocked that their bills have increased by so much. Are they living under a rock?

Honestly electric plug in heaters will be consuming ridiculous amounts of electricity and are really not practical to use. You may find oil filled free standing radiator heaters better on energy consumption. It may be worth looking into your budget in general because there may be other areas you are using more energy than necessary without realising. Gas central heating will be much much cheaper to run than electric heaters whichever way you look at it.

I think most people are feeling the pinch. I did spot some cheaper petrol at a Jet garage yesterday though. 12p a litre cheaper than supermarkets. Just shows me supermarkets must be rinsing us.

People often make the mistake of thinking GCH is expensive if they have a smart meter because:

1. You go from not using much gas to a lot of gas when the heating goes on.
2. Gas data updates every half hour, unlike electricity which is constantly updating, so you can see some alarming leaps in cost on the display if the heating is on.

We probably haven't seen the end of people surprised, shocked and horrified by the price rises, as the scale of the increases are only just immerging and until people start seeing actual winter bills, many will still be unaware.

Over the summer there has been a lot of people saying their supplier wants to put up their direct debit, so they've cancelled it 'so they'll pay for what they use', which is fine in the summer and there's been a lot of people claiming their prices have only gone up 10/20% 'so they can't see what all the fuss is about'.

The trouble is that when you're lulled into a false sense of security because you're comparing summer bills at the new price with winter bills at the old price that were subsidised by overpaying the summer before and you're hit with a unit rate that is more than double what it was a year ago, you're paying for full winter usage as you use it, and you haven't paid for some of it in advance, your bill could well be 3 or even 4 times more than what you paid on direct debit last winter.

Winter has only just begun, we'll be seeing posts like the OP with alarming regularity until well into next year.

Absolutely. Theres a certain garage in West Essex selling much cheaper fuel than anywhere else which has long queues all day long because people have realised that if this garage can do it so cheaply then other places are clearly not passing the reduction in supply costs onto the consumer.